Rusty Morrison, Norman Fischer, Maxine Chernoff

6 FEBRUARY 2014 — thursday

Poetry Flash presents a book launch and reading by Rusty Morrison, Norman Fischer, and Maxine Chernoff, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)


MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Rusty Morrison’s new book of poems is Beyond the Chainlink. Lisa Robertson says of it, “How do we continue to choose, speak and interpret given the weight of the end fact? Silence in Morrison’s new work is transformed from an absence to a concept, a potential translator of temporal givens; she tends silence’s conscious work with a measure and a subtle ear.” Her previous collections have been prize-winners: the true keeps calm biding its story won Ahsahta Press’s Sawtooth Prize, the Academy of American Poets James Laughlin Award, the Northern California Book Award, and the DiCastagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America. After Urgency won the Dorset Prize from Tupelo Press, and Whethering won the Colorado Prize for Poetry. She has been co-publisher of Omnidawn Publishing since 2001.
Norman Fischer’s new book of poems is The Strugglers. Joseph Lease says of it, “Elegy, philosophy, magic: the deepest and most playful awareness: simultaneity, love: human voices wake us and we drown in a world of flow and loss and damage: poetry was meant to be this…” A Zen Buddhist priest, former abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, he’s published many previous books of poems, including Conflict, Questions/ Places/ Voices/ Seasons, and I Was Blown Back. A co-founder of Makor Or, a Jewish meditation center in San Francisco, he translated the Hebrew psalms, his version titled Opening to You, which was published in 2002. Fischer is also the author of several books of prose.
Maxine Chernoff’s newest book of poems is Here, “a celebration of just that, the here and now—how we inhabit it affectively and visually, how we represent it and build small narratives from the scarcest of clues.” She’s the author of six books of fiction and fourteen books of poems, most recently Without and To Be Read in the Dark. She is co-editor of the journal New American Writing and co-translator of The Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin.